Holly Jacobs - Dad Today, Groom Tomorrow

“I didn’t let my father live my life back in school, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.” He left the underlying accusation that it was about the only thing that hadn’t changed.

Louisa might look like the girl he’d known so long ago, but she wasn’t who he’d thought she was back then, and he was sure she was even less like his imagined first love now.

“And you?” he asked. “Did you study marketing or advertising like you planned?”

“No. Things—” She stopped short.

Joe wondered what she’d been about to say.

“Well,” she continued, “my plans changed. I came to work in Erie. I opened The Chocolate Bar last year. It’s all mine. At least with the bank’s help it is.”

“When I came here, I never expected to find you here. After—” He forced himself to cut off any recriminations. “Well, it just never occurred to me you’d have come here. Actually, this was the last place I thought I’d find you.”

“You were wrong,” she said with a small shrug of her shoulders.

“What made you look for a job in Erie?”

Erie, Pennsylvania.

When they were in high school back in Lyonsville, they’d sworn they wanted to leave town. They wanted to move someplace where no one knew who the Clancys or the Delacamps were. They wanted to go someplace where they could be anonymous, where no one knew their family histories three or more generations back.

They wanted a chance to be just Joe and Louisa.

Joe remember that day when, as a joke, they’d thrown a dart at a map. It had landed on Lake Erie, just beyond the Erie shoreline.

We’ll move to Erie when I graduate, Louisa had said, laughing.

All these years later, he could still hear the sound of her laughter.

Despite the hardships in her life—her father had been the town drunk before he died and had left Louisa and her mother impoverished—she’d always been laughing. A quiet, joy-filled sound that had made his heart constrict even as it had made her blue eyes light up.

There was no laughter in those eyes today. Just wariness as she answered, “It’s just that I always thought I’d live here. I’d spent such a long time dreaming about a Great Lake, about a place where I could just be me, not ‘Clancy’s kid’—you know how they used to say it with that mixture of scorn and pity in their voices. I just wanted to leave that behind.”

When she’d left that behind, she’d left him behind, as well. Joe didn’t understand it then, and he didn’t now, but he was too proud to ask her why.

Why she’d left him when he would have followed her anywhere.

“I drove here on a whim. I drove to the foot of the dock. It wasn’t as touristy then as it is now. But I stood there, and could look at the peninsula across the bay, and I knew this was home, just like I’d always dreamed it would be.”

“That’s how I felt, too,” he said. “I’d been working at the hospital in Lyonsville, but wanted to do something different. A friend told me he knew someone who was on staff at a hospital that needed an E.R. doctor. When I checked it out and found it was in Erie, well, I knew it was the job for me, so here I am.”

“Welcome to Erie.” She glanced at a door toward the back of the shop, then at her watch. “But as much as I’ve enjoyed catching up, it’s time for me to close.”

“I came in to buy something for the nurses and aides in the E.R. Everyone’s been so great helping me settle in, and I wanted to thank them.”

“Fine, but we need to make it quick. What did you have in mind?”

She was looking at the back of the room again.

Joe looked, as well, but all he could see was a door framed by shelves, loaded with little trinkety sorts of items.

“Do you have any suggestions?” he asked.

“Would you like an assortment of chocolates? That way you’re bound to have something everyone will like in the mix.”

“Fine. Give me…what do you think? Five pounds?”

“Well, that would ensure that everyone got their share and then some.”

“Great. Five pounds, then.”

He watched as Louisa ducked behind the big glass case. She plucked handfuls of chocolate from this pile, then from that, filling up a huge box.

Five pounds of chocolate was an awful lot of chocolate. Not only could he treat the staff, but all the patients, as well.

“So this is all yours?” he asked, needing to fill up the silence.

“Like I said, it’s mine and the bank’s. I bought out my old boss’s equipment when he decided to get out of the candy business.”

She smiled when she mentioned her old boss. Joe felt a spurt of something hot. What was it?

No way could it be jealousy. He and Louisa hadn’t seen each other in almost a decade. They had no claims on the other. He had no cause to be jealous.

“The lease was up on his store,” she continued, “so I moved everything here. Perry Square is perfect. There are so many businesses down here, and there’s been such a surge in tourism that The Chocolate Bar has done well its first year.”

“I’m happy for you.” He paused, looking for something else to say. “Do you ever go home?”

“No. With Mama dying six months after I left…well after that, there was nothing holding me there.”

“I heard about your mother. I was sorry.”

“Me, too. She’d have loved—” Louisa stopped short and stared at him a moment, then gave a little shake of her head “—to see me succeed. She always told me I could do anything I set my mind to.”

“She was an amazing lady.”

Louisa placed the box on the counter. “Here you go.”

“How much?”

“Nothing. It’s on the house.”

“I can’t take it without paying.” He reached in his pocket and withdrew a bill and placed it on the counter.

Louisa looked ready to argue, but suddenly her eyes moved past him, and focused on something behind him.

“Hey, Mom, I’m done with my homework. Can I take a Mud Pie home, do you think?”

Joe turned around and found himself face-to-face with a boy…a boy who had his black hair and his green eyes.

“Aaron, you know better than to interrupt when I have a customer. Go into the back, and I’ll come get you when I’m done.”

“Geez, I just want one stupid Mud Pie,” the boy mumbled as he left the room.

Joe stood, unable to move or say anything, as he tried to process what he’d just seen.

No, who he’d just seen.

“Louisa?” he said as he slowly turned around and faced her.

She didn’t need to answer his unasked question. It was there in her face.

Guilt. “Why?” he asked.

Why had she hidden the fact he had a son—he had a son!

The boy had to be sevenish, he thought, quickly doing the math in his head.

“Why?” he repeated.

Louisa was white as a sheet. “I didn’t mean for you to ever know.”

“That’s obvious,” he said. He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. He didn’t want to.

Even after she’d left him without a word, Joe would have sworn that Louisa would never do anything so despicable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you didn’t want kids—”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know enough. And I’m sorry this happened. I’m sorry we rocked your nice, neat little world. You can be sure that wasn’t my intention. You never wanted kids—you made that clear. I didn’t plan on Aaron, but I don’t regret him. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Just walk away and forget that you saw me, forget that you saw him. Go back to the life your parents planned and plotted for you.”

When they were young and talked of a future, he’d said no children. He looked at the mess his parents and Louisa’s parents had made raising children and had decided he wouldn’t take the chance of following in their footsteps.